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Candidates gone wild: Basking in moon glow

Observing the four-ring primary circus that was Florida last Tuesday, it is apparent that establishment Republicans are taking comfort in Gingrich’s poor showing. He’s been unrelenting of late in his attacks on establishment elites, ironic in that he’s been a Washington insider for decades.

These elites happen to be the movers and shakers of Wall Street, K Street, the conservative media, Old Guard politicians, and the super rich whom George W. Bush affectionately referred to as “my base.” They worry that the incrementally improving economy will recover too soon — before Nov. 6. They worry about a new Newt resurgence when primaries on Super Tuesday bring forth new waves of the disillusioned in the fashion and fury of South Carolina. Elites have always been uncomfortable with insurgencies.

Gingrich did well in the Florida’s panhandle where the demographic is more like the Deep South than the more diversified peninsula. Certainly his Cold War rhetoric got him the vote of many Cuban-Americans, but Florida Hispanics are not all of Cuban ancestry. His statement that the Palestinians are an “invented people” may have given him a bump in the polls among Jewish Floridians but, like those in New York, Jewish-Americans tend to be somewhat cynical of patronizing politician whose exuberances touch on the demagogic. Elderly and transplanted Floridians tend to be more moderate on economic issues and less evangelical in religious enthusiasms. And women frown on trophy wives.

Ever the panderer, he made a promise to Floridians that as president he would have a permanent American base on the moon. That he could do this while reducing government spending and tax revenues shows that some history professors are in need of remedial math. His focus here is on private sector financing where space tourism might attract venture capital. Somehow, I can’t picture Sir Richard Branson spending billions to equip lunar hotel rooms with gravity-flow toilets and space suits designed by Karl Lagerfeld. The prohibitive costs and inherent dangers of lunar vacationing would appeal only to the super rich with a death wish, a minuscule demographic. If the project literally were to get off the ground, who would be there to pick up the pieces? It would be a private equity firm like Bain Capital which would pay its corporate raiders substantial handling fees before selling off the component parts to China.

The Florida vote seems to have vindicated, at least for the moment, those establishment Republicans who have already declared, as if by fiat, that Romney will be Obama’s opponent in November. It is an indication of establishment power and influence that conservative political and media elites have come out against Gingrich with guns blazing. Bob Dole predicted that, with Gingrich at the top of a Republican ticket, Obama would win in a landslide. National polls seem to bear this out. A worrying sign, according to conservative pundit Bill Kristol, is that there were 12 percent fewer Republican primary voters in Florida last Tuesday than in 2008.

George Will, a conservative inheritor of William F. Buckley’s intellectual mantle and an icon of establishment Republicans, is viscerally disdainful of Gingrich, claiming that the former Speaker of the House “embodies the vanity and rapacity that makes modern Washington repulsive.” When Gingrich compared himself to Sam Walton, Will responded that “there is almost an artistic vulgarity in [his] unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages.” When Gingrich compared himself to Reagan, Elliott Abrams, Reagan’s advisor in the State Department, reminded conservatives that the former speaker publicly opposed Reagan on Contra policy and on collaboration with Gorbachev.

Conspicuously further down in the food chain for thought, Anne Coulter has been lambasting Gingrich for an ego that trumps the interests of the party. She reminds voters that the attack ads unleashed by Gingrich in Florida will be expropriated by the Democrats for the general election, that such internecine invective is a violation of Reagan’s famous 11th Commandment. And she has lately been drawing attention to the “Gingrich Doodles” in which he refers to himself as the arouser, the advocate, the definer, the teacher, and the leader of civilization. Frankly, those scribbled doodles sound like Gingrich was having another of his solipsist-like, center-of-the-universe, flow-of-consciousness moments that give rise to worries of grandiosity.

As a Democrat, I would like to see Gingrich nominated. His baggage seems to overshadow Romney’s flip flops, Cayman Island tax shelters, claims of indifference to the very poor, and Bain Capital’s lobbying on behalf of Wall Street. More to the point, Mitt Romney is boring, a caricature of a remote and humorless private equity CEO without much personality or imagination.

As far as Newt’s lunar colony is concerned, he seems to be emotionally wed to science fiction and fantasy futurism. His temperament makes him, according to George Will, “blown about by gusts of enthusiasm for intellectual fads.” The moon! It wasn’t a fad in 1969. It is now. We’ve been there and done that. Let’s get our house in order and focus on repairing the damage done by the Bush Administration’s Great Recession. All four of the remaining Republican primary contenders continue to refer to our current mess as the Obama’s Recession. They are being disingenuous, hoping that the electorate suffers from short-term memory loss. The recession began on George W’s watch. If they really believe what they are saying in this regard, then delusional is a better word. They are like space cadets basking in moon glow and soaring in oxygen-depleted clouds. A Democratic victory in November should coax them back to earth.

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William X. Andrews recently retired from Columbia State where he taught history for 35 years. He resides in Columbia.